04/17/20
Ducks is a roiling, intimate, period-avoiding period novel that lets you get to know a shy baker housewife over a thousand-page torrent of her reactions, memories, opinions, and dreams, engagingly familiar at first on the basis of accessible writing and a shared modern existence, and later on because you begin to recognize the recurring elements, e.g. as anxieties of the type that are too mood-killing to say aloud but which can really bounce around a person’s mind, things like the long-standing thirst for blood and guns in America, things like distant daughters, pets, and mothers, in our lives one day and out the next, things like why doesn’t anyone else seem to care about the Indian mounds, all of this and much, much more packed into one sentence, one steady stream of thoughts, or facts, which throw pieces of this person’s life at you and leave it to you to connect them all up into the whole.
Maybe the book didn’t need to be quite as long as it was, and maybe the “this, not that” construction started to feel a little old by its twelfth appearance, and maybe I would have enjoyed the glut of movie stuff more if I knew who all those actors were, but I think the fact that this modern monologue has a flow so reminiscent of lucid thought, characterizes the crazee nonstop pace of the contemporary era with such a fun new format, and is anchored by so many riveting authentic moments, especially toward the end, more than makes up for those trivial faults and establishes Ducks as a bursting monument to our time.